Mon 12/16: Red Fang at Logan Square Auditorium
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Heavy metal band Red Fang might be best known for their beer-soaked music videos, but they kill it on record too. “A lot of people have probably heard Red Fang and just don’t realize it. Over the past three years or so, two of the band’s music videos have gone viral—’Prehistoric Dog’ off their 2008 self-titled debut and ‘Wires’ off 2011’s Murder the Mountains—earning more than 2.5 million YouTube views between them (and that’s only including the official label accounts, not the uncountable reposts),” I wrote in this week’s Soundboard. “So even if you’ve seen the boys in Red Fang crash a LARP session in homemade beer-can armor or transform a beater station wagon into a battering ram, you might not have heard a single other song from them. And that’s a shame, because they fucking rip. Red Fang play groovy post-stoner metal with plenty of massive guitars and caveman drums—a sound not too far from Doomriders or midperiod Baroness—and they steadfastly refuse to take themselves too seriously.” Fun fact: Red Fang released a new music video at the end of last week. This time it features zombies. And of course beer.
Have you heard about this guy Kanye West? The Chicago native, one of hip-hop’s biggest and most controversial stars, brings his ambitious Yeezus tour to the United Center after a postponement last month. “Kanye West’s sixth solo LP, Yeezus (Roc-a-Fella), is a messy pile of contradictions: a rap record that sounds like industrial music, it vacillates between enlightened political consciousness and garish celebrity complaints, between self-aggrandizement and self-loathing, and between snarling noise and hooky pop,” says Miles Raymer. “Created with help from a broad range of collaborators, including Daft Punk, Chief Keef, Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), and an entire squad of underground electronic musicians, it’s a harsh, sharp-edged album that inverts the sumptuous, hyperluxurious sound of his 2011 Jay Z collaboration, Watch the Throne; that prickly sound, combined with Kanye’s occasional foul-ball lyrics (‘Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet-and-sour sauce’) has helped make it one of the most polarizing recordings in recent memory. But Yeezus’s sonic aggression makes for a bracing listen, and for all the self-absorption and self-contradiction in the self-portrait that emerges out of the chaos, it’s also a sui generis work on par with Dylan at his most turbulent.”
